The Fall are a great band, but they’re not worth losing your girlfriend over

Like John Peel before him, Dave Simpson, music critic with the Guardian, loves the Mancunian punk band The Fall. Two years ago, he started trying to track down all 43 former members of the band for a book. Each of them had notoriously fallen out of favour with the band’s front man Mark E Smith, a man known for his falling out with people.

According to this article, the search cost him his car, his health and eventually his relationship of 17 years.

“It was my turn to feel the Curse of the Fall. For months, everything went wrong. I drove my shiny new MG (purchased after my other car blew up) into a river. My beloved Leeds United were relegated …I was struck down with nasty food-poisoning. Suzanne announced she was leaving me. Her dissatisfaction apparently started when I was “finding all those people in the Fall”. For 17 years, there had been two predominant sounds in my life: the sound of the Fall, and the sound of Suzanne’s breathing as we lay side by side. And now, because of one of them, the other was gone. Inevitably, she dumped me for a trucker, a Container Driver, the title of my favourite Fall song.”